Forgotten Life by Brian Aldiss Page B

supplied by air, so half-rations it is.
    Soon it will be dark. That’s the end of Christmas Day and then we’ll be on the wonderful road again. I tell you these things. Try to understand. Something really extraordinary is happening to your old brother.
    God knows when this’ll be posted but – Happy Christmas!
    Somewhere
31st Dec. 1944
    Dear Ellen,
    How are things at home? How is the mouth organ player? You all seem very far away. There are great psychological barriers in communicating rather than in just firing off letters for their own sweet sakes. To be honest, I’m not sure if the outer world exists any more.
    And I’ve got other problems … For instance, I was hauled up before an officer I had better not name (he will probably read this letter before you do) in the Censorship office. Apparently I have been giving too much away in my letters and endangering security. (You might be a Jap agent in England, sending all my letters on to High Command in Tokyo, or something similarly daft.) There I stood, rigid at attention in my soiled jungle greens; there he satimmaculate in khaki, putting me right. On such situations the British Empire is founded.
    In future any references to place names or troop movements will be deleted from my letters. There is to be no further attempt to convey a picture of what is happening in these possibly most exciting days of my life. I made a protest, but it’s like butting your blinking head against an advancing tank. Any attempts to evade regulations will be punished.
    It was hard enough in the first place, trying to describe life here to you. Now I’m forbidden to try to convey a picture! So here’s what may prove to be my last try.
    I mean the picture is like one of those marvellous Brueghels (in this culturally deprived area I have even forgotten how you spell that weird Flemish name …). Is there one called The Conversion of St Paul ? Where there are thousands of people on horseback and on foot in the tall mountains and, although St Paul is having his moment right in the middle of the picture, no one is taking a blind bit of notice. We’re doing this incredible thing and no one’s taking a blind bit of notice – just grumbling about where their next packet of fags is coming from …
    Later. Oh, burps . Now the first day of 1945. No celebrations last night, bringing more complaints. Fancy wanting to celebrate. I was collared to shift heavy stores. Too exhausted then to do anything more than sleep.
    We’re at a place called – but I named it once and daren’t do so again or they’ll keelhaul me under the nearest 3-tonner. Great amassment of vehicles. People all strolling round, brown as berries, smoking among the branchless trees. (Hope that doesn’t give our positions away.) Half-rations. God in his heaven, CO in his mobile home. Only the Japs missing from the picture. (You could perhaps get Dad to send me some ciggies if he’s feeling generous.)
    Oh, I can’t concentrate. Something comes between us, and you know who he is.
    Well, I’ll just tell you how we got here. I think it was the night after I last wrote that we got on the road again, the whole division,all very orderly. (I don’t tell you which division, so it’s safe …) I was more careful about how I travelled, not wanting to meet my end yet – dying for your country should not entail being run over by your own 3-tonner! Yet the sight of endless trucks trundling like elephants in convoy is irresistible. Are they off to the Elephants’ Graveyard or a solemn heavyweight orgy? Some stops, some starts, yet on the whole a steady funeral pace. Huge chunks of landscape phantasmal in the dusty dark.
    Sleep, huddled in a silly position on a crate. Waking next morning very early to behold a wondrous sight.
    Is dawn a secret shy and cold,
    Anadyomene, silver-gold?
    Are we still on terra firma
    Or merely moving into – another